Batcolumn

Batcolumn, 1977

Claes Oldenburg

Plaza of Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building

600 West Madison Street

             In 1965, Pop artist Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022) began making drawings for colossal monuments consisting of everyday objects enlarged to gargantuan proportions. Some of his proposals included a giant electric fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, a pair of giant scissors to replace the Washington Monument, a Good Humor ice cream bar for Park Avenue, New York, and a railroad station in the form of a wristwatch for Florence, Italy. Many, of course, remain unrealized but Chicago is home to one structure that made it off of the paper: Batcolumn.

            Commissioned by the U. S. General Services Administration’s Art-in-Architecture program, the metal latticework piece generated a great deal of disapproval in the press, with one citizen complaining that the artist “ripped off the taxpayers for a $100,000 baseball bat.” For the project, Oldenburg sought an appropriate symbol for the city and one that would make formal references to the surrounding environment. When a nearby chimney reminded him of a baseball bat, he took the outline and soon decided to open the surface in order to relieve the solid mass and echo the cross-bracing of Chicago’s many steel bridges.

            The realized structure is nearly 100 feet tall, formed from a network of 24 vertical and 1608 connecting struts of Cor-Ten steel and aluminum painted with gray enamel.  Placed atop a four-foot high, ten-foot diameter pedestal, Oldenburg’s monument may be read as a paean to baseball, a tribute to the steel industry, or simply an irreverent poke at our expectation that a monument necessarily be “heroic.”  

George Washington Monument

George Washington Monument, 1904

Daniel Chester French and Edward C. Potter

South Martin Luther King Drive, north of Washington Park, north of East 51^st Street

            The original version of this monument was commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution as a gift to the French for their assistance in the American fight for independence. It was unveiled at the Place d’Iéna in Paris, near the Trocadero, on July 3, 1900, and was the first monument by an American sculptor to be erected in that city. Two years later a group of Chicagoans, including Benjamin F. Ferguson and Clarence F. Buckingham, asked permission to install a replica of the bronze equestrian figure and granite base at the northern entrance to Washington Park.

            Washington is depicted with sword upraised as he took command of the Revolutionary forces at Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 3, 1775. Potter created the horse while French was responsible for the figure and he modeled the face after a bust created from life by Jean Antoine Houdon. Potter collaborated with French on several works that included human and animal figures, including groups that flanked the Grand Basin at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Potter remains best known, however, for his lions at the New York Public Library.   

Other works:

• The Republic
• Bulls with Maidens
• Memory: Marshall Field Monument

Untitled

Untitled, 1972

Herbert Ferber

Madison Street and Ogden Avenue

            Commissioned by the American Dental Association (ADA), this 22-foot high structure was originally located in the eastern light well at the ADA headquarters on East Chicago Avenue, where it could be viewed from the 2^nd floor as well as from the ground. An open-form soldered construction of Cor-Ten steel, the sculpture offers a number of different visual experiences, depending upon the viewer’s perspective. Herbert Ferber (1906-1991) was a natural choice for the commission, as he was a practicing dentist as well as a leader in the Abstract Expressionist movement in sculpture. Describing his approach to sculpture, Ferber explained: “The forms hold the space and the space holds the forms.” Rejecting naturalism and, over time, restricting his forms to lean, simple shapes, Ferber aimed to create structural environments that allow viewers to, potentially, move through the work.  

          In 1992, not long after the artist’s death, the work was donated to the city of Chicago and it was moved to its current location. Although more available for public viewing, the spot alongside two busy streets is not ideal for studied consideration of the forms and the view from above has been completely lost. 

Being Born

Being Born, 1983

Virginio Ferrari

Donald J. DePorter Gateway

Ohio and Ontario Streets at base of Kennedy Expressway

            A gift from the Tool and Die Institute, Virginio Ferrari’s Being Born is a tribute to art and technology and to the industry that commissioned and fabricated it. The two rings of stainless steel, one fitting precisely within the other, honor the precise metalworking skills involved in die making and suggest, with the open section on the outer ring, that the industry is open to growth and new ideas. The cutting of the metal parts was carried out by Joseph T. Ryerson & Son, Incorporated.

            Originally located at State and Washington Streets and positioned within a shallow reflecting pool, the work was relocated in 1996 when the formerly named “New Orleans Triangle” was re-landscaped and re-designed as the Donald J. DePorter Gateway. The project was led by the Chicago Gateway Green Committee, which hoped to create a better first impression for drivers entering the city. The committee removes graffiti and beautifies expressways around the city with funds from private supporters. Ferrari was born in Verona, Italy in 1937 but has been based in Chicago since the mid-1960s.

Slabs of the Sunburnt West

Slabs of the Sunburnt West, 1975

Richard Hunt

University of Illinois at Chicago campus, south of library

801 South Morgan Street, between Polk and Taylor Streets

            Commissioned by the B. F. Ferguson Monument Fund, this massive 30 x 30 foot bronze ground plate with five protruding slabs was conceived as a memorial to Illinois poet, journalist and biographer Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Inspired by Sandburg’s 1922 poem of the same name, sculptor Richard Hunt (b. 1935) exhibits his technical virtuosity in the medium of welded metal as he gestures toward Sandburg’s lines:

            Stand up, sandstone slabs of red,

            Tell the overland passengers who burnt you.

            Tell ‘em how the jacks and screws loosened you.

            Tell ‘em who shook you by the heels and stood you on

                        your heads,

            Who put the slow pink of sunset mist on your faces.

            Sandburg, winner of three Pulitzer prizes (two for poetry and one for his multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln) came to prominence with the publication of his work in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in 1914. He was part of the second wave of Chicago’s Literary Renaissance, along with writers Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters and Ring Lardner. His coverage of social unrest during 1919 for the Chicago Daily News resulted in a book called The Chicago Race Riots. Deeply interested in American folk culture, Sandburg also spent years lecturing and performing folk songs and, in 1927, he published one of the first collections of folk music, titled The American Songbag.

            Richard Hunt began his artistic training at the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the age of 13 and he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Art Education from the Art Institute in 1957. By 1963, prominent art critic Hilton Kramer described Hunt as “one of the most gifted and assured artists working in the direct-metal, open form medium” anywhere in the world. Hunt began exploring the sculptural possibilities of metal welding after viewing the 1953 exhibit “Sculpture of the Twentieth Century,” which included works by the Spanish artist Julio González (1876-1942). González, who acquired his autogenous welding skills while working at a Renault automobile factory, described his welded-iron pieces as “drawing in space.” Hunt’s early career included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Tamarind Artist Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, but he has since become best known for his large-scale public sculptures. 


Other works:

• Building Growing
• Eagle Columns
• Fox Box Hybrid
• Freeform
• From Here to There
• We Will
• Why
• Winged Form